Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Arjan van de Ven
2005-12-03T14:36:45Z

> ase for a stable series.
>
> After 2.6.16, there will be a 2.6.16.y series with the usual stable
> rules.
>
> After the release of 2.6.17, this 2.6.16.y series will be continued with
> more relaxed rules similar to the rules in kernel 2.4 since the release
> of kernel 2.6.0 (e.g. driver updates will be allowed).
>

this is a contradiction. You can't eat a cake and have it; either you're
really low churn (like existing -stable) or you start adding new
features like hardware support. the problem with hardware support is
that it's not just a tiny driver update. If involves midlayer updates as
well usually, and especially if those midlayers diverge between your
stable and mainline, the "backports" are getting increasingly unsafe and
hard.

If the current model doesn't work as you claim it doesn't, then maybe
the model needs finetuning. Right now the biggest pain is the userland
ABI changes that need new packages; sometimes (often) for no real hard
reason. Maybe we should just stop doing those bits, they're not in any
fundamental way blocking general progress (sure there's some code bloat
due to it, but I guess we'll just have to live with that).